Romney Closes Large

What is most striking about the last days of this year’s presidential campaign is that Barack Obama has gone petty, urging his supporters to vote out of “revenge,” while Mitt Romney has gone large, offering a vision of a bigger and better America. Byron York captures the mood at Romney’s huge rally in West Chester Ohio last night: “Romney closes big: ‘Love of country’ vs. ‘Revenge.’”

Obama’s “revenge” remark was valuable to Romney not because it could be turned into an attack ad. “Revenge” was valuable because it underscored, a thousand times, Romney’s new emphasis on the bigness of his own campaign versus the smallness of Obama’s. Romney’s closing argument is filled with words and phrases that convey a largeness of vision: destiny, renewal, purpose, better life, better days, better future, fresh start, new beginning, a bigger, better country. In the campaign’s final days, Romney is pushing hard on the idea that things really can improve with new leadership….

A critical part of the theme is that Romney is now asking people to join him in a larger cause.

Meanwhile, the voters’ lack of enthusiasm for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign is palpable. Neither Obama nor Joe Biden can draw much of a crowd. (In Biden’s case, that is probably a good thing, from the campaign’s standpoint.) A number of their events have frankly been embarrassing, and they don’t dare appear in venues like the ones Romney uses, Red Rocks, West Chester and so on, because they know supporters won’t turn out to fill them, and they will look silly. It is not hard to tell which campaign has the look and sound of a winner.

At Gay Patriot, Dan Blatt is posting photos as he receives them from a reader who is attending tonight’s Romney rally in Denver. One might have thought that the Red Rocks extravaganza would be Romney’s finale in Colorado, but no: here is a photo of the crowd taken, I believe, before the rally had even begun. Dan notes that the crowd is bigger than that at all four of Obama’s recent Ohio events, combined:

As in 1980, voters face a choice between a cramped, hateful, failed incumbent and an optimistic, inclusive challenger whose confidence stems from the fact that his policies embody the principles that have always worked when they have been tried here in the U.S. and around the world. If this country is anything like what it was 30 years ago–if we have not been hopelessly compromised by a corrupt culture–the election will not be close.